The idea of positive moderation is to make it possible to float the cream to the top for people who choose to filter for a specific category. Being nice to every non-troll post you find is well intentioned, but dilutes this.

There's an actual difference between Insightful, Informative and Interesting, and metamoderation leads me to think a number of slashdotters with mod points find these terms vague enough to be interchangeable, since they're all positive moderations.

Insightful: articulates a perspective which otherwise might go unconsidered. Let's break that down into three parts bceause it seems obvious, but it isn't.

"articulates" -- explains in context, in detail.

"a perspective" -- a viewpoint, not merely an opposing opinion or a cynical barb.

"which otherwise might go unconsidered" -- insight usually makes you go "ah, I hadn't thought of that" or something like it. It isn't someone merely making a point you agree with better than you could, yourself.

Informative -- facts about the subject at hand, like personal experience or a link to an external resource which either enhances its point, puts it in perspective or outright refutes it. Because Informative is a less subjective moderation, a torrent of replies which disprove the post's information is likely to get that post's Informative mod metamoderated Unfair, so if you don't understand the subject well enough to know whether the poster's talking out his/her ass, save your mod points.

Interesting -- As often as not, something useful which doesn't fit into the above two categories. In a thread about HD capacity ceilings, a link to research on the theoretical maximum speeds of magnetic media is technically diverging from the subject at hand, but not enough to qualify as Offtopic. It's Interesting.

If something is informative, don't mod it Interesting. If something is merely interesting, don't mod it Insightful or Informative.

Lastly, reposting an entire article from another site like Wikipedia (instead of, say, linking to it) is more often than not obvious karma whoring. I metamod those down because it's an attempt to confuse quantity with substance and because I end up wasting time scanning for some substituted trolltext in the body. Don't do it. Excerpt, excerpt and link or just link.

The MSDN blogs insist that they rewrote IE from the ground up. Uh, no.

Yes, they corrected box model related glitches which were almost entirely the result of miscalculating which thing takes precedence, and there were a slew of them. Congrats on fixing those -- after nearly half a decade of reports and complaints. And yes, it looks like the > operator works now and :hover now works with all valid elements.

Unfortunately, the renderer they claim to have rewritten from scratch has a peculiar feature: every single CSS2 property which wasn't implemented in IE6 is still missing in IE 7 beta 2. Every HTML tag which renders incorrectly in IE 6 renders incorrectly in IE 7 beta 2. Every one. Many of those properties have no effect on the compatibility of existing websites, created in FrontPage or elsewhere.

By total coincidence, IE 7 beta 2 (which was specifically mentioned in their blogs as being the new renderer) has no support for any CSS spec beyond the ones in IE 6, even ones which have been requested repeatedly and implemented for years in all other browsers:

• CSS content insertion (before:, after:, content:)
• CSS Quote character selection
• Quote characters placed around contents of QUOTE elements
• Correct implementation of BUTTON (IE refuses to pass the VALUE attribute)
• OBJECT as a valid substitute for IMG (IE places nonremovable scrollbars around image; when given different height/width values, instead of scaling the image it resizes the pseudo-IFRAME around it)

These are only a few. Again, almost none of the missing spec has a negative effect on legacy webpages, and I'm not even mentioning the more abstruse CSS2 specs no other browser cares to implement (e.g. character width).

I'm inclined to believe they rewrote how IE works within the OS and its security model. However, the likelihood that they would intentionally release a developer beta that shows a renderer nearly identical to IE6's only leaves two possible conclusions:

1. The schedule was rushed and build 5296 aka beta 2 isn't an accurate representation of the new renderer, merely a demonstration of a more accurate object model.
2. Redmond thinks a waxed paperboard box filled with steaming feces is entitled to be called vanilla ice cream.

I'll keep it short. I appear to get to metamoderate on a regular basis here, and having two posts being modded "Troll" recently (one deserved, one a joke I made too subtle) hasn't changed that any.

One-line comments marked "Insightful" are going to be pounded into the ground unless they're actually insightful. That means, "articulates a point (or point of view) you might not have taken into account," and a short sentence is usually not up to the challenge.

As much as you might enjoy anonymously wielding "Flamebait", "Troll", "Offtopic" and "Redundant", I trebly enjoy metamodding them "Unfair" if it looks like punishment for someone offending your sensibilities while remaining within the subject.

"Informative" posts with incorrect technical advice will be checked in context; if the poster was clearly talking out of their ass, thumbs down on the mod. Don't mod something informative because it *sounded* smart.

Remember, metamoderation serves the purpose of deciding whether *you* get mod points in the future. Jerk off and I'll catch you in it.